Code Climate, Timber, and NYCode

This coming September, NextView will be hosting NYCode, a half-day conference to recognize and explore the tremendous engineering community in New York City. Below is a brief post to explain why we are doing this. If you’d just like to sign up for early RSVP, click here to do so: NYCode RSVP.

In his recent post about the NYC tech ecosystem, Matt Turck highlighted two developments useful in considering New York’s ability to foster and maintain a local developer community. First, he noted that the talent base here is maturing. For engineering specifically, developers are beginning to leave the New York outposts of tech titans like Google and Facebook to join NY startups or start one here themselves. Second, Matt emphasized ‘Deep Tech’ as an emerging sector in New York. Where once MongoDB stood alone, a cohort of deep tech startups now exists, including growth stage companies like DataDog and Digital Ocean and younger startups like Clarifai and Geometric Intelligence.

To the above evidence of literal tech in New York, I would add the diverse set of schools and courses that now cater to engineering. From Cornell Tech and Flatiron School to the engineering programs at Rutgers and the HackNY Fellows from NYU & Columbia, New York is teeming with avenues to pursue a technical education.These programs and institutions graduate waves of newly minted engineers into the local ecosystems every twelve months, if not every six.

At NextView, we have been bullish on the NYC engineering community for a few years. In the spring of 2014, Dave met Bryan Helmkamp who had founded Code Climate as an automated, static code review product for Ruby. They had a series of conversations about the greater opportunity to build a truly open and extensible platform for a broad set of static analysis, engaging the engineering community to build modules for their language of choice. By that June, NextView was leading the Code Climate seed round. This past winter, I met Zach Sherman and Ben Johnson, two engineers who were leaving SeatGeek to start Timber, a developer tools company focused on user logs. Over a few weeks, we discussed what the two founders saw as an immediate need for a lightweight, real-time logging interface built for application engineers. In February, NextView led a pre-seed investment in Timber, alongside our friends at Notation, Ludlow and Wonder Capital.

What many Deep Tech startups require in a founding location is consistent engineering activity — Meetups to demo their products, other engineering groups or startups to be beta testers, and larger engineering orgs to poach talent from. In short, they need local density. Matt concludes that New York engineering density is finally becoming inevitable and we second that statement wholeheartedly, it is apparent and proving itself to be self-sustaining as the current cycle matures.

As proud advocates of this density development, we want to recognize it. So, NextView is inviting the New York engineering community to NYCode, a half day mini-conference with a couple of panels and fireside chats featuring some of the founders, data scientists, engineers, and investors who are making Deep Tech a reality here. To firmly dispel the rumor that quality, surplus engineering only exists on the west coast, join us for NYCode an afternoon of discussions featuring Eliot Horowitz, Alexis Le-Quoc, Allan Beaufor, Albert Wenger, Bryan Helmkamp, Murat Bicer and more.